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Thu Mar 24, 2011 at 08:30:00 AM EDT
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| { Installment 9 in Ivan Illich's Energy and Equity series. }
Dominant versus subsidiary motors
People are born almost equally mobile. Their natural ability speaks for the personal liberty of each one to go wherever he or she wants to go. Citizens of a society founded on the notion of equity will demand the protection of this right against any abridgment. It should be irrelevant to them by what means the exercise of personal mobility is denied, whether by imprisonment, bondage to an estate, revocation of a passport, or enclosure within an environment that encroaches on a person's native ability to move in order to make him a consumer of transport. This inalienable right of free movement does not lapse just because most of our contemporaries have strapped themselves into ideological seat belts. Man's natural capacity for transit emerges as the only yardstick by which to measure the contribution transport can make to traffic: there is only so much transport that traffic can bear. It remains to be outlined how we can distinguish those forms of transport that cripple the power to move from those that enhance it. |
| eli_beckerman :: Energy and Equity: Dominant versus subsidiary motors |
| Transportation can abridge traffic in three ways: by breaking its flow, by creating isolated sets of destinations, and by increasing the loss of time due to traffic. I have already argued that the key to the relation between transport and traffic is the speed of vehicles. I have described how, past a certain threshold of speed, transport has gone on to obstruct traffic in these three ways. It blocks mobility by cluttering up the environment with vehicles and roads. It transforms geography into a pyramid of circuits sealed off from one another according to levels of acceleration. It expropriates life-time at the behest of speed.
If beyond a certain threshold transport obstructs traffic, the inverse is also true: below some level of speed, motorized vehicles can complement or improve traffic by permitting people to do things they could not do on foot or on bicycle. A well-developed transportation system running at top speeds of 25 mph would have allowed Fix to chase Phileas Fogg around the world in less than half of eighty days. Motors can be used to transport the sick, the lame, the old, and the just plain lazy. Motor pulleys can lift people over hills, but they can do so peacefully only if they do not push the climber off the path. Trains can extend the range of travel, but can do so with justice only if people have not only equal transportation but equal free time to come closer to each other. The time engaged in travel must be, as much as possible, the traveler's own: only insofar as motorized transport remains limited to speeds which leave it subsidiary to autonomous transit can a traffic-optimal transportation system be developed.
A limit on the power and therefore on the speed of motors does not by itself insure those who are weaker against exploitation by the rich and powerful, who can still devise means to live and work at better located addresses, travel with retinue in plush carriages, and reserve a special lane for doctors and members of the central committee. But at a sufficiently limited maximum speed, this is an unfairness which can be reduced or even corrected by political means: by grassroots control over taxes, routes, vehicles, and their schedules in the community. At unlimited top speed neither public ownership of the means of transportation nor technical improvements in their control can ever eliminate growing and unequal exploitation. A transportation industry is the key to optimal production of traffic, but only if it does not exercise its radical monopoly over that personal mobility which is intrinsically and primarily a value in use. |
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"Now, is this the deal I would have preferred? No. I believe that we could have made the tough choices required - on entitlement reform and tax reform - right now, rather than through a special congressional committee process. But this compromise does make a serious down payment on the deficit reduction we need and gives each party a strong incentive to get a balanced plan done before the end of the year. Most importantly, it will allow us to avoid default and end the crisis that Washington imposed on the rest of America."
--President Barack Obama on the debt ceiling "deal"
"Despite Democratic control over the White House, despite Democratic control over the Senate, despite overwhelming opposition from the American people, a small minority of the members of the Republican-controlled House have successfully pushed an extreme right-wing agenda onto the American political landscape. It is an ideology which believes that despite the fact that the rich are getting richer, the middle class is shrinking, and poverty is increasing, all - all of the burden for deficit reduction should rest on working people."
--Independent Senator Bernie Sanders on the debt ceiling "deal"
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Then and Now
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Then...
"Last year Evergreen, a Massachusetts company, agreed to establish their first-ever United States based manufacturing facility here in Massachusetts. They did so, or are doing so, at Devens. They have now agreed and chosen to triple their size at Devens. Their next phase of expansion, right here in Massachusetts, a signature company in a signature sector, and we congratulate all of the folks at Evergreen and look forward to continuing to work with you...
We made a personal commitment to Evergreen for the sake of Evergreen, but also because we wanted to show that there are ways in which state government, in working together with private industry and with the utility companies, could begin to create a different kind of environment, a different kind of business climate here, to grow that sector, and it is happening. It's happening. Evergreen is one of the most prominent examples, but there are a whole host of examples."
--Governor Deval Patrick, April 7, 2008, boasting about state investment in Evergreen.
and Now...
"Evergreen Solar Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection yesterday, completing a stunning reversal of fortune for a high-flying alternative-energy company that once seemed to herald a new era for the Massachusetts economy... At its peak, Evergreen employed roughly 900 people locally and attracted more than $50 million in state support, as its stock price soared above $100 a share.
Yesterday, Evergreen's stock closed at 18 cents. The company shuttered its manufacturing plant in Devens earlier this year and now has only 85 employees left. Massachusetts is one of its top creditors, owed $1.5 million in rent."
--Erin Ailworth, Boston Globe, August 16, 2011
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